Peach acquires Advalidation
November 8, 2021
Video advertising workflow and delivery specialist Peach is to acquire Advalidation, a SaaS product focused on improving ad experience and compliance. The official announcement follows a move to acquire Advalidation starting earlier this year, completing September 2021.
“The acquisition of Advalidation adds a key component in fulfilling Peach’s mission — to help fix how advertising works,” explains Doug Conely, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Peach. “This is our first acquisition specific to online advertising and focused on media owners and sales houses, adding to our growing set of capabilities in that area. It is an exciting move that will benefit our clients and the industry as we work to connect up the ad ecosystem, making it easier to work with and manage.
“We will use our global footprint to bring the Advalidation benefits to more publishers and broadcasters and over time create a compelling buy-side value proposition for advertisers and agencies to be rolled out across our markets.”
Ccording to Peach, the advertising space over the last 20 years has become deeply complex as more components have entered the ad ecosystem, leading to highly time consuming workflows. Digital campaigns compared to linear are given weeks to activate, yet run routinely late, leading to high costs — additional fees, failed media plans and delayed campaigns, to name a few. Ad Ops teams have to deal with a multitude of tasks on a daily basis, including slow manual testing of video, VAST and display ads, managing a range of stakeholders and much more — all actions that take up too much time.
Advalidation automates testing of VAST tags, digital video and display ads, all through an accessible, easy to use interface. It gets rid of manual testing for issues such as the volume being too loud in videos, ads that slow websites down, mobile ads that consume lots of data which in turn helps teams remove poor quality ads that affect the user experience and ultimately media owner monetisation.
“This is the perfect time for us to be joining Peach,” suugests Jesper Pops, co-founder of Advalidation. “Our mission, as is Peach’s, is to make it easier for clients across the advertising ecosystem to deliver better ads.”
“We aim to improve the ecosystem. We want to reduce the time it takes to manually review creatives, make it easier to deal with compliance issues and simpler to review complex creatives like XML-based VAST tags for privacy violations and other issues. Let’s simplify this process.”
Advalidation, as part of Peach, will work to continue to improve tests and build new features, such as a recent monitoring tool that lets users receive alerts on creative swaps mid-campaign, tracking pixels added and increasing load time. Peach will also work to integrate Advalidation features directly into the Peach platform for advertisers and agencies, focused on checking assets before they get to publishers, making collaboration even easier and the workflow faster and more integrated. More on this will be announced as features are released.